A Brief Visual History of On-Screen Text Messages in Movies and TV

BBC’s Sherlock is lauded often for its use of onscreen texts, which differs slightly from the other’s we’ll see here. As Graeme McMillan at Wired UK points out, the way Sherlock and other characters use technology is strikingly familiar to us:

Internet and cellphone usage abounds throughout the cast, especially as a shorthand for emotional connections (or the lack thereof). Whether it’s characters refusing to answer certain peoples’ calls, or Sherlock nagging Watson into submission via text onslaught, we all know what these things mean because we do them ourselves.

McMillan ends his piece with the same haunting revelation my professor put forth: “Is Sherlock actually about how transhuman we’ve all become without even noticing?”